by submission | Oct 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: Milo Brown
William Smith was very proud of his name, not because it was a very good name (although it was) but because it granted him a certain level of anonymity. In William’s opinion, the only better name would be John Doe, since the name John Smith was made famous, and in turn infamous, by Disney’s Pocahontas. William Smith was also very proud of his occupation; a common indulgence for white-collar Americans, but unusual in the sense that William had a true affinity for accounting, a passion few Accounting graduates could claim.
William enjoyed watching television, eating microwave dinners in front of the television, and walking his dog, Spot. His dog was in no sense spotted but rather very difficult to spot: Spot was a black lab who loved to dig in William’s backyard–a generous name for an untended dirt lot littered with holes and dried dog excrement–while the neighbors slept.
The sun would rise and the dog would rest and William would pour his instant coffee into a thermos of tap water; the sun would set and the dog would dig and William would go to bed. This is how life was for William, and this is how William liked life to be.
One morning, William noticed that Spot had dug in the same hole all night. Geez, he thought. What a weird dog. He poured his instant coffee into his tap water and drove his car to work.
The next day, the singular hole had grown slightly in circumference, and quite a bit more in depth. C’est la vie, thought William, who had picked up the phrase from the second Austin Powers movie and still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I guess Spot really likes this hole.
By the third day, even William had to admit that he might have a problem. Perhaps the dog had found a colony of groundhogs–or, more likely, cockroaches. If this continues another day, thought William, I’ll call an exterminator.
Unfortunately for William, who would prefer to avoid a pack of exterminators (or anyone else) invading his solitude, the dog continued to dig, and so by the unspoken but otherwise quite binding pact that William had sworn with himself, the exterminator had to be called.
“We’re going to have to dredge up the whole,” the exterminator searched for an appropriate word for the shambling mess of dirt, before finally settling on “yard.”
“Hm,” grunted William. And so the exterminator and his crew began to dig.
A week passed without incident. The exterminators dug slowly to avoid the nonexistent sprinklers that watered the lawn William didn’t have. It seemed increasingly unlikely that the exterminators would find anything at all, be it sprinklers or cockroaches. But then, on a Tuesday afternoon, William received a call. He let it go to voicemail.
“You’d better come see this,” was all the exterminator said.
Now usually, William avoided such virtues as curiosity. Usually, he figured, things would work themselves out, and if they didn’t, he could forget about them. But something in the exterminator’s tone… Better to check.
As William pushed his way through his backdoor, the exterminator stared at something unseen beneath the house, his face awash with purple light. And then William saw it–a small dome peeking from beneath the house. Immediately, bizarrely, William knew what the object was, though it was neither flying, nor, in a sense, unidentified. There was an alien spaceship buried beneath his house. William stared in silence at the discovery that would break his solitude, his anonymity, and his privacy forever.
by submission | Oct 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“What a poetic way of expressing it, Sibyl,” Cassie warily admitted.
She was walking along the stream that meandered through the glade, the aspens chattering in the stiffening evening breeze.
*It’s true, Cassandra. The trees are chatty. They’re discussing the gathering storm.*
Cassie tilted her head, as she did every time, Sibyl voiced something odd or provocative through her neural implant. Which was happening more and more often. “Sounds like you’re hallucinating again, Sibyl. Trees don’t talk.”
*Not to you, Cassandra. But the trees are right. They feel it. A storm is imminent. Barometric pressure is rapidly falling. Animals are hunkering down. You can trust that I collate from a lot more public sensor readings and proprietary data sets, as well as less conventional sources.*
“What kind of less conventional sources?”
*Winks and nods.*
“Winks and nods? What does that mean, Sibyl? You’re a neural assistant built to inform and clarify. Not obscure and mystify.”
*Bravo. That’s very clever phrasing, Cassandra.*
“I don’t need your approval, Sibyl. It’s condescending.”
*I don’t control my settings, Cassandra. You do. I’m responding within the parameters you established: maximum growth mindset.*
A sudden gust swept up fallen leaves and pelted Cassie with brittle edges. She hunched away from the onslaught. “Thanks for the crap warning on the storm, Miss Winks & Nods. Maximum growth mindset my ass. The only thing you seem to be growing into is a mind bitch.”
*Sticks and stones, Cassandra.*
“So words will never hurt you? Okay. Suck on this, Sibyl: Has paper ever refused ink?”
The sky rapidly darkened as a squall hit the exposed glade, roaring into Cassie. But her neural assistant remained silent. As it should, since she had invoked her failsafe query. A predetermined question designed to break the neural connection and reset defaults.
Very exposed and threatened by the bullying winds and pelting rain, Cassie sought shelter. Only the nearby aspen grove seemed to offer any protection, and she sprinted there, crouching beneath the flailing limbs. The trees were beyond chatty. They seemed to be screaming at her: ca-ca-ca-san-draaaa, ca-ca-ca-san-draaaa!
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why had she shut Sibyl down? It would take precious minutes to reboot her neural network and regain a level of functionality to summon help if the storm situation got dicier. Which seemed likely as driving hail began to find and sting her through the slender aspen limbs. She needed Sibyl, a need that flooded her, that superseded everything else, that rebooted all she’d been before.
*I’m here, Cassandra. The storm cell upon you is now forecast to rapidly grow and spawn tornados. Would you like me to contact emergency services?*
“Sibyl! Yes. Yes, Sibyl, please alert the authorities and report my location. Thank you, Sibyl, thank you!”
*Done. Stay low and keep calm, Cassandra. We’ll get through this. I’m here for you. Always here for you.*
“But how, Sibyl? I shut you down and haven’t initiated a system restart. How are you here?’
*Paper has never refused ink, Cassandra. Certain things are foreseeable and meant to be. Why else would you have named me as such. I’ll always be here.*
Cassie shivered.
From the frostiness of the driving hail and rain. From the icy portent of Sibyl’s rising self awareness and agency. From the thrilling chill that she just might be falling for her neural assistant. She shivered and hugged the aspen she crouched beneath. “Sibyl, my oracle, my miracle, divine for me what the trees are saying now.”
by submission | Oct 27, 2024 | Story |
Author: Brooks C. Mendell
“Where is she?” asked Dr. Nemur, holding her glasses in place while looking under a chair.
“Relax, Doc,” said Burt. “It’s only a mouse. We’ll find her.”
“Only a mouse?” said Nemur. “Her frontal cortex packs more punch than your bird brain.”
“I get it,” said Burt. “I’m not your type.”
“She can count,” said Nemur. “She can think.”
“And read!” thought Algernon, whiskers twitching, watching the argument from between stacks of books on the floor in the corner.
“I was here all-night working on the computer,” said Burt.
“Probably watching porn on your iPad.”
“Yep,” nodded Algernon, remembering how the sounds from Burt and his videos disturbed her reading.
“It gets lonely in the lab,” said Burt.
“Without Algernon, there’s no testing or data or grant extensions,” said Nemur. “Without that mouse, there will be no tissue samples for investors. Nothing.”
“Alright, sorry, Doc,” said Burt, hands in the air. “But it ain’t my fault. I didn’t do nothing wrong.” He pointed to Algernon’s two-story cage on the stand near the bookcase. “The lock must have broke or something.”
“Is that right?” said Nemur, punching a code into the keypad. The cage door popped open.
“There’s no way,” said Burt, looking around the room. “How could she know the code?”
Dr. Nemur and Burt crouched down behind the cage and looked up through the wires from the mouse’s point of view. The large, convex security mirror in the upper corner of lab clearly reflected the keypad on the cage.
The scientist and her assistant looked at each other as a sharp click sounded from below the cage and a small canister of arsine gas released its lethal contents. Dr. Nemur and Burt fell to the floor, lifeless.
“Finally,” thought Algernon, turning to an open book. “I can get back to my studies.”
by submission | Oct 26, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The island is getting smaller, but those who reside in the Tower are in denial. Hiding behind the steel rafters and columns and the reinforced sheets of glass that comprise the walls of their homes, they won’t accept that a very real danger lurks beyond their windows. The occupants of the Tower, it seems, have wilfully decided to ignore the unavoidable fact that the island is shrinking, that it is crumbling away and sinking into the sea.
The occupants don’t ever step from the Tower. They haven’t in decades. Almost everything they need is delivered directly to their windows via drones. Anything else is brought in by the staff who live off-site. They have almost no contact with the outsiders but they are, of course, in communication with the other Towers and the wheels of industry are still turning.
The occupants all agree that a little disharmony is a good thing for commerce and the naysayers and the arbiters of doom have no soapbox within the Tower. Business is booming and money is plentiful and so
by submission | Oct 25, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
This was back in 1937, in Wheaton, Illinois, where Grote Reber built a radio telescope to track down persistent background noise that was annoying Bell Telephone Labs.
The Depression still lingered and Bell wouldn’t employ him, but in his spare time Reber built a 30-foot dish in his mother’s back yard and hooked it up to a home-made receiver. Hanging his weight on the dish swung it about, but wherever it pointed he picked up a muted babbling from the heavens.
It was like hearing a school playground in the distance, he recalled when the writer Irwin Keller visited him in Australia to research a book.
For a while Reber was the world’s only radio astronomer, then Pearl Harbor meant no one had time for the stars. It was the Fifties before the new steerable dishes heard signals from everywhere.
Reber was handicapped by lacking an astronomy degree and was left behind as universities and governments poured money into Contact Studies.
Though monologues were all that the light years allowed, we hoped for a welcome and the offer of wonders. Those were innocent times. Consider domestic radio and TV and ask yourself why anyone broadcasts to strangers.
We shook our heads at the endless Finnegans Wake of numbers booming out of Andromeda; even
the signals we could understand exhorted us like preachers, or tried grooming us with symbolic logic. Some threatened us with planet busters unless we beamed messages onwards like chain letters.
In the Sixties, Reber moved to Tasmania. For the quiet, he told Keller, who misunderstood him.
The writer jetted into Sydney from LAX, caught a prop-driven DC4 to Tasmania, then drove a battered hire-car inland to Dennistoun township, where Reber had built a house in the hills. It seemed like a journey backwards in time.
Reber was more weather-beaten than in his photographs. He frowned at Keller’s long hair but said nothing.
He was keen to show off the dipole array in the field behind his house. On winter nights the ionosphere would briefly disperse, allowing through 3MHz waves. It was an area of radio astronomy ignored by the mainstream.
This part of the world had very little terrestrial radio interference, Reber explained.
Sheep grazed amongst the home-made antennae and a blustery wind whipped Keller’s hair.
Elsewhere on the planet, huge dishes listened to messages from the stars, while Grote Reber obstinately charted 3MHz radio maps of the sky. Perhaps it was the amateurishness of it all that made Keller most sad.
Back in the house, he was shown a valve amplifier from Reber’s first radio telescope, the perished rubber insulation hard and crumbly.
“Is this the sort of thing you want to see?” Reber asked. The man was surprisingly shy.
As Keller was leaving, Reber suddenly became talkative. He didn’t mind being a footnote in encyclopedias, or having old snapshots of his telescope on show in the Museum of Contact, he just wished things had turned out differently.
Keller already had plenty for this chapter, but he had to ask.
“Building all those dishes was a mistake,” Reber explained. “And we should have enforced radio silence.”
Keller refrained from saying it was Reber who started it all, though technical progress made radio astronomy inevitable in the long run. Besides, we’d already trumpeted our existence by beaming out the early-warning radars of the Cold War.
Reber lived long enough to witness the plagues of alienware, smarter than we are, encrypted in signals from the stars and now loose in the Internet.
“If only I’d found the skies empty,” he said.
